Posts tagged “imac”.

So your Mac keeps logging you off automatically? After about 30 minutes?

My work iMac, running OS X 10.9.5 Mavericks, kept logging me off after a period of a half hour or so. I would leave my desk for a meeting, say, and come back to find me logged out and all my applications closed. Grindingly frustrating.

After lots of searching, I finally found the solution – almost by accident.

Head to Preferences, and the Security & Privacy pane (above).

Go to the fourth tab at the top, “Privacy.” Hit the “Advanced…” button at the bottom of the window.

The designs of this age were so calm, warm and pure, despite the brutally honest and analytical design. I especially love the way the clear layer interacts with the opaque white inner shell.

Agreed. And while Kim includes the G5 iMac in his Mac trio, I’d throw in the lovely harbinger (along with the eMac) iMac G4.

The current aluminum lineup of Macs makes for good design as well, but “white” says “Apple” to my mind. And I’ll always favor white Apple products: the iPhone, iPods, etc.

It’s not always a practical design choice, as Kim points out. A lot of these Macs show their age because of smudges and scratches. I think it’s worth it, to have that gleaming white machine brightening up a room.

For normal people iTunes Match will solve the problem of getting the music they have on one computer to all of their computers and Apple devices without networking, filesystems, or sync cables. For me iTunes Match is a frivolous expense…The only advantage iTunes Match provides me is the flexibility of streaming or downloading songs on the go when I am away from my computer.

I’ve talked about this a few times on The hello Show, but this new way of doing your music that Brand explains is, to me, much like MobileMe was in terms of syncing: it doesn’t solve a problem for me. Brand mentions he already knows how to sync his iTunes libraries across multiple machines. My sticking point is that I have the one true iTunes library, and everything runs from that without problems.

My process for syncing is tied with the way my routine goes. Before I head to bed, I plug my iPhone into my Mac for recharging and syncing. Any changes made on the iPhone (appointments, contact updates, etc.) get synced to the iMac, and any new updates on the iMac (podcasts, songs, calendar additions) get synced down to the iPhone. Then, the next morning, I unplug the iPhone and head off to work.

Most of the music I want to listen to on my iPhone gets synced through iTunes. If I notice something is missing, during the next sync I add that artist or playlist. There are no kinks in my system.

Yes, the higher-quality music files from iTunes Match are attractive. The tradeoff is I have to dip into a system I’m not entirely comfortable with yet.

As my MacBook Pro slowly dies, I’ve called my old G4 iMac back into service. Years ago, that machine was wiped clean and given an install of Mac OS X 10.5 before being boxed in the basement. On Friday I will wrap up one week of using it as my primary work machine. In that time I’ve found that it’s slow, beautiful and perfect. Here’s why.

Caolog notes that things run a tad slower on the iMac, but “waiting a half of a second isn’t the end of the world.”

Even better? “This is the most beautiful computer Apple has made,” he says.

Not only do I agree, but after using a 15″ iMac (and at a paltry 800 MHz) for an entire year as my main workstation, it more than served its purpose. Caolog kept his needs simple: TextEdit, Preview, and a few other apps. That’s it.

When your needs are simple, a simple (and gorgeous) Mac is all you need.

Before the iMac, computers were beige. Beige. That might have been fine in the early ’80s, but so were corduroy trousers and sandals with socks and you wouldn’t want to see them in your living room now. And that’s what’s important about the iMac: it’s the machine that made the world at large realise you can have a computer and not have to hide it. It was — and still is — the only computer that’s genuinely sexy.

You’ll get no arguments from me there. But perhaps the iMac is the greatest of the last century, since it was released in the late ’90s?

And as much as I love me some iMac, it’s hard not to think of the iPod or iPhone as the gadget of the 2000s. What sold more? Which had the bigger impact on the industry it landed in? What wiped the slate clean and truly innovated?

The iMac is still a Mac. Internally, and software-wise, it’s no different than a Mac Mini, Mac Pro, or Macbook. For that matter, the original iMac was little different from the Mac SEs before it other than tech specs and software. All-in-ones, even stylish ones, were nothing new in 1998.

Instead of winning some arbitrary contest, the iMac should be known as the Mac that launched Apple’s resurrection. After the original Bondi Blue, everything changed. It was Apple’s first big hit after Steve Jobs returned. For that, it deserves a lot of praise – but certainly not some goofy, arbitrary award from CNet.

Things start getting trickier if you’re on a Mac with older versions of the Mac OS. I couldn’t do tests with Mac OS 8.5/8.6, though I suspect that if you have a capable Mac and a suitable version of iCab or Opera (or maybe even Internet Explorer 5), you could still be able to access the Simplenote Web interface.

Using my PowerMac G3 running OS 8.6 and the latest build of Classilla, with JavaScript turned on, I could access Simplenote’s interface. The trick, I thought, would be if it was a useful interface. So I typed in an easily-checked addition to my grocery list:

The note, “Try out SImplenote on OS 8.6,” did, indeed, appear on my OS X 10.6 version of Safari – synced and ready for action:

The other browsers? Internet Explorer 5.1 on the PowerMac threw up a Typekit certificate error and wouldn’t let me past the login screen. iCab 3.0.5 loaded the login screen fine, and even showed the basic outline of the notes page (posting the Fusion ad, for instance – something Classilla wouldn’t do until I turned on JavaScript), but failed to load any actual notes. When I tried creating a new note in the text entry field, it didn’t send the note back to the server.

Both Opera 5 and 6 treated Simplenote much like iCab did (above), loading an empty text field for a new note, but nothing else. And the formatting looked awful.

Classilla, it seems, is the Simplenote trophy winner on Mac OS 8.6 – a good thing to keep in mind for the lowend Mac users out there who want to sync notes between their Mac and iPhone or iPad.

Since I made the decision to retire some of my classic Macs, I had some thinking to do: what parts, if any, would I keep? And would I miss any functionality?

I thought about all the hard drives, with their drivers and software, that were going bye-bye, when it hit me that I could install a hard drive or two into the PowerMac G3 I was saving. And since the iMac G3 was the only Mac that would work with my serial-to-USB adapters, maybe a brain transplant was in order. So that’s what I did – took out the iMac’s hard drive and installed it into the Blue and White, just to see if it would work.

This meant opening the iMac and getting to the hard drive. I’ve covered how to get into an iMac G3, but getting to the hard drive was a bit trickier since it sits snugly below the motherboard tray in some infernal metal sleeve.

There were screws to unscrew – quite a few of them. The CD-ROM drive also sat on top of the hard drive:

To top it all off, there are power and connection cables snaking around both drives, squeezed into that metal tray pretty tightly. So I had to figure which cable went to which drive and yank them out:

After I unplugged the cables and got the CD-ROM drive out of the way, I had to remove a few more screws in the side of the drive and get rid of the little metal prong that held the drive in place. A little bit of wiggling and the hard drive was out.

From there I placed the iMac’s hard drive in the second bay of the PowerMac (above), set the screws in the side to hold it in place, and plugged in the connection and power cables. After the installation was complete, I got the question mark Mac folder on startup, meaning either one drive or both were conflicting. The iMac’s drive was set to be a master drive, which is a no-no in the ATA world. So I set the original PowerMac drive to master and the installed iMac drive to slave, and the issue went away.

When the PowerMac did start up, it booted into its usual OS 8.6 drive, and what do you know – there was the iMac’s hard drive on the desktop.

Something weird that I never expected: the PowerMac and iMac desktops were combined. Looking at the desktop above, the Entrega file, Doom.jpg, and Grackle file were both on the PowerMac’s desktop, not the iMac’s. But each time I reset the system with a different startup disk, both environments seemed to share the desktop files. Pretty neat.

One weird issue that hasn’t gone away, however, is my iMac’s tendency to not shut down or restart. Heading to Special > Shut Down or Restart made the iMac’s screen flash, the icons blink out for a second, but then no restart or shut down would happen. To turn the thing off, I had to put it asleep and then unplug it.

Maybe installing the hard drive in the PowerMac would help, I thought. But no dice. After setting the iMac HD as the startup drive, the restart/shutdown problem was still there.

One suggestion had me dumping the OS preferences and emptying the trash. Trashing the Mac OS and Finder prefs didn’t help. Others suggested a complete reinstall of OS 9, which is a method that sounds more like a Windows thing than a Mac thing.

I tried a series of boot-up key combinations to no avail. The only thing that worked reliably was setting the iMac HD as the startup drive, and boot with extensions turned off (holding Shift on bootup). That let me turn off and reset the iMac HD.

The other weird issue: I set up Multiple Users on the iMac, thanks to OS 9′s then-new feature, but a while back the iMac started booting into the Owner account automatically – there was no login required and no Multiple User welcome screen. Heading to the Multiple User extension manager, I found the strangest thing: there wasn’t one. Well, the extension was there, but it wasn’t working. It showed up in the Applications menu as an option, but offered no interface for managing the actual extension.

It’s hard these days to find reliable troubleshooting information for OS 8 and 9, and a lot of my searches have come up empty. But really, I have the iMac’s hard drive in the PowerMac – saving both space and time. And I can still accomplish most of what I need without the physical iMac being present. So mission accomplished.